A Hitch In Time

Not even Peter Hitchens could be bothered to mention, either Priti Patel on the capital punishment for which there will never be a parliamentary majority, or The Jacob Rees-Mogg Show on the imperial measurements that a 50-year-old cannot add up in his head, since they have no more been taught at Eton than anywhere else over the last half-century or so. 

The 67-year-old Hitchens, who is practically old enough to The Jacob Rees-Mogg Show's father, is of the last generation that could do anything more than give their height, their weight, and the distance from London to Brighton, in the old system, no matter where they had gone to school. And yet Britain muddles on. Doesn't that make you proud? It certainly should.

As for The Jacob Rees-Mogg Show's real father, Harold Wilson once said of him that, "He speaks with all the authority of a twice defeated Conservative candidate," for so he was. There will never be another sight quite like the face of The Jacob Rees-Mogg Show when Andrew Neil accurately described him as "upper-middle-class", and thus as nothing more than that.

It is clear from Hitchens's views on Carl Beech and on the definition of extremism that he recognises his own status as a dissident, even if he does have a Fleet Street column. Hypothetically, if there were indeed to be some kind of attempt to reintroduce the death penalty, then he would have to oppose it in practice.

He knows perfectly well which of him and a liberal would be far more likely to be charged in the first place, and which would be far more likely to receive the maximum sentence upon conviction, since neither charging nor sentencing is anything to do with a jury.